A carnival of technology

I don’t really like the gate in front of the apartment complex. Besides the fact that it’s always broken—I had planned at one point to keep a record of whether and when it’s functional, but I was overly ambitious and tried taking pictures to back up the status, a task that proved difficult while driving to work in a morning haze—it provides no more than a false sense of security. I don’t happen to have any statistics to compare crime rates in gated vs. ungated communities, but if you really want to get inside, it’s not very hard.

I got to witness a bit of an incident at the gate today. The gate is a Doorking system with an in gate, an out gate and a call box that can be driven around so residents can still get in if someone is spending half an hour trying to use the box. When someone is using the box for its intended purpose, this tends to create a situation where the gate is opened from the box and resident pulls around anyways to open it with the remote. Today while coming home I saw someone open the gate with the box, only to be cut off by a Jeep with a North Carolina plate. To compound the situation, the Jeep made a point of stopping in the middle of the gate until the arm started to go down before continuing. The other car managed to get in unscathed, and, as luck would have it, they both live in the same set of buildings that I do. When everyone had parked, the yelling started.

I can certainly understand the man’s anger, since the Jeep was being a major-league asshole, but the argument still struck me as amusing. First (exaggerations mine), he held forth his gift from on high, the secret resident access code (maybe they ran out of remotes) giving him Holy Writ to enter the complex. He then followed with threats to report the Jeep’s tag to the apartment office, which had a tone combining the futility of both “I’m telling mom” and “this is going on your permanent record.” The Jeep driver countered with his own threats to do the same, there was a shouted exchange of names, and everyone went inside. I do pity the people working in the apartment office who have to face pointless issues like this one, but I really wish that they’d get rid of the gate.